Troops Carry Precious Gift: Peace of Mind

Mohammed Nur Aden was awakened in darkness early Wednesday by a loud roar. He rose from the matting he shares with his rail-thin daughters and hundreds of other hungry Somalis to look skyward with a rare smile on his face.

“We know they are coming to protect us,” he said, as pairs of U.S. jets did lazy circles and dozens of helicopter gunships thundered overhead, heralding the arrival here of 900 Marines and French troops.

One day soon, he said, “I will go back home and plant my crops. But, until I can be sure that I’ll be safe, I’ll have to stay here.”

Wednesday’s arrival of a heavily armed contingent of U.S. Marines and French Legionnaires in this battered, famine-belt town drove guns and armed gangs off the streets for the first time in months. It put smiles on the faces of relief officials and tens of thousands who are at risk of starvation in Baidoa.

But more important, it signaled the beginning of a second major assault on Somalia’s 6-month-old famine. Newly freed from the threat of looting and assaults, aid officials on Wednesday were, for the first time, anticipating the day when they will be able to reach rural Somalis still at risk of starvation--and begin the pressing task of returning those who already have been saved to their homes and their farms without fear of attack.

“We’re not dealing with vast numbers of starving people anymore, although the numbers are still too high,” said James Fenn, with CARE in Baidoa. “Now we’re dealing with vast numbers of people who are dependent on relief food and afraid to go back home.”

Relief agencies have been feeding hundreds of thousands of people in southern Somalia since the height of the famine in August. More than 300,000 people have died, and many more have been displaced by the drought and the brutal armies in Somalia’s recent civil war. Those troops destroyed food stockpiles, killed cattle, filled wells with rocks and damaged water pumps.

The 100,000 people in Baidoa today include 60,000 famine refugees. Many more, barely surviving, have remained on farms or in rural villages heretofore unreachable by relief aid. And emaciated men, women and children still arrive daily at dozens of feeding centers in Baidoa.

The death wagon here, run by the Somali Red Cross, picks up 60 bodies a day at eight collection points in the city. That is double the 30-a-day famine death toll of a few weeks ago but down from the more than 100 who were dying at the height of the famine.

“People have the impression that the Marines have come to save the day,” said Dennis Walto of the International Medical Corps, a U.S.-based aid agency. “What they will do is make us more efficient and make relief work safer. But as far as saving Somalia, we have been doing that.”

Relief food has been arriving in Baidoa, mostly by air. But that is four times more expensive than the overland route from Mogadishu’s ports, nearly 200 miles away. And lawlessness in the countryside also has forced aid agencies to operate almost exclusively from Baidoa, which means that hungry rural Somalis must uproot their families and head to the city for help.

The U.S.-led, U.N.-approved military mission is designed to get the food moving overland again, to give refugees the peace of mind they need to return to their homes when their health has improved and to allow relief agencies to reach deep into the countryside and feed Somalis closer to their homes.

“Now we can get back to full speed again,” said Russ Kerr of California-based World Vision’s relief operation here. “We want to get to work again in the rural areas, to get rid of these bandits. The highways will soon be open, and we’ll be able to move food again.” Added Jenny O’Reilly of the aid agency Irish Concern, “When all the lawlessness stops, then it finally will be possible for us to concentrate on the need that’s there.”

In Baidoa, the ratio of adult-to-child victims of famine has soared in the last few months. Child deaths vastly outnumbered adult deaths in September. But now adults are dying twice as fast as children. That is partly because so many of the region’s children already have died but also because adults have been able to live longer without food.

One of Irish Concern’s seven feeding centers feeds 1,000 adults and children in the center of Baidoa. Many are healthy enough to return home. But until the Marines arrived, center director Catherine Rice had been afraid to push them out the door.

“When they leave here,” she said, “the people with guns have been taking advantage of the weak ones without guns.” Refugees are even afraid to accept new bolts of cloth to wear or pieces of plastic to rebuild their houses, fearing that looters will rob them before they get home.

Mohammed Nur Aden, 45, had once been the richest man in his village, with 300 camels and a large farm. But during the civil war seven months ago, troops loyal to ousted President Mohamed Siad Barre stole his camels and looted the food that he had stockpiled for times of drought. When his crops failed, his family began to waste away.

Aden’s 2-year-old boy starved to death three months ago.

“Many of my brothers also are gone,” he said. His two daughters, ages 5 and 7, now have red tags on their stick-like legs, a label that indicates they require intensive feeding to treat severe malnutrition.

A tiny 12-year-old named Maynum Malin Hussein arrived at the Irish Concern feeding kitchen four days ago. Her spindly arms, barely half an inch thick, were indicative of the debilitating effects of weeks without food. “I feel better today,” the girl said Wednesday, shaking a visitor’s hand. “I’m in a good mood because when I saw those planes, I was thinking they were bringing food.”

Another child who arrived last week, Mohammed Nur, 10, already has earned the nickname “bag of bones,” Rice said, “because that’s what he was.” Nur’s parents had starved to death and his brother died on the street outside the center. Rice remembers that Nur arrived at the center with just one question: “Who will bury my brother?”

But Wednesday, the feeding center was filled with optimism and a new sense of security, commodities as rare as grain in this parched land.

“Where’s your gun?” Rice teased Abduhakim, 19, one of the center’s security guards. Only a day before, he had been carrying an automatic weapon. Wednesday, he was carrying a walking stick.

“Where’s yours ?” Abduhakim answered, smiling.

“There’s certainly an air of hope here today, and I haven’t seen that in a very long time,” Rice said. “And if these people can be happy that the Americans are coming, then we can be happy, too.”